CVF at Miden Festival
Kalamata, Greece
Program 2: Cairo Video Festival: Three Questions on Contemporary Visual Elements
Curated by: Mena El Shazly and Mohamed Allam
Duration: 50 min
The Cairo Video Festival is a project initiated in 2005 by Medrar for Contemporary Art.
Eight editions have taken place since, bringing artists from different countries to exhibit their video art
and experimental film works in Egypt. The festival is dedicated to the power of creative minds. The
selected films are shown to a wide audience in Egypt, introducing them to different ideas and creating an
important meeting point for artists from all around the world.
With this program, curators Mena El Shazly, Mohamed Allam and Adel el Siwy (who contributed the
curatorial text) research three sets of questions: 1. Are there boundaries between different forms of
visual arts? Should an artist exploit the potentials of his field first before borrowing from other fields? Or
should they reconsider the means by which a work is formed in order to contain migrant elements? 2.
How does the video incorporate elements from other arts and how video artists, for example, resort to
the painting legacy just like our predecessors had been attempting to add the coloring element to
sculpture. 3. The last question is related to our contemporary view of contemplating the flowing
intersecting visual scene and the multiple media of image production. Are we witnessing new visual
elements that are yet to be revealed? Have visual aesthetics become mutually dependent on extremely
fast sequential shots, leaving the viewer chasing after scenes? Does the consecutive erasure of scenes
result in a more poignant memory? Or will the multiple stimulants and details beyond the capacity of the
eyes to catch create a fresh way of viewing? What is the impact of these new elements on contemporary
mind and conscience?
1. Rasha Amin, Lost In Transition, Egypt 2015, 2.38
2. Ageda Kopla Taldea, Couplets for an Everlasting Eve, Spain 2016, 5.20
3. Young Joo Lee, Disgraceful Blue, South Korea 2016, 10.32
4. Mina Mir, All Tru-ish, ΗΠΑ 2015, 2.37
5. Masanobu Hiraoka, The Eye of the Storm, Japan 2015, 5.03
6. Haoge Liu, Fish Tank, China 2016, 5.59
7. Bhopal, The path, France 2016, 6.34
8. Marwan El Gamal, Egg Legs, Egypt 2015, 7.40
_______________________________________________________________________________
Video Art Miden* | 5-7 of July 2018
From zero* to infinity!
[miden means “zero” in Greek]
Video Art Miden is expanding and broadening, and is ready to present a rich program of
international video art in Kalamata -more specifically at the Historic Center and the beach of the
city. Celebrating the strong relationship of the organization with the city in which it started and
initially developed, the curatorial team comes back with public projections of contemporary video
art from all around the world, from July 5 to July 7, each day activating a different urban area of
the city.
Video Art Miden is counting 14 years of continuous artistic & curatorial activity, gathering the
most interesting works of Greek and international video art and finding new ways and new venues
for projection and promotion of this specific form of art, in Greece and abroad. During this year's
summer events in Kalamata, the audience will have the opportunity to watch more than 170
video works, selected from the recent call for entries addressed by Miden to video artists
internationally.
The summer events this year include morning and night screenings, with many different thematic
programs, alternating and differentiating morphologically and conceptually, expressing the basic
trends of our time. The program starts dynamically on Thursday night (July 5) at the Atrium of the
Archaeological Museum of Messenia, at the Historic Center of Kalamata; the next night the
screenings will be located at the beach (Thalassa Lounge, July 6), with music-based videos
screened next to the wave, as an alternative music party, and on Saturday night (July 7) Miden
returns to the City Center, at the Anagnostara pedestrian road, where it completes its activities
with indoor and outdoor screenings (Stoa Londou, Bandapart Recording Studio).
This year, the morning screening zone and the tributes to foreign festivals (Now & After / Russia
and Cairo Video Festival / Egypt) will be hosted in the Archaeological Museum of Messenia, on
Friday and Saturday (6 and 7 of July). A special theoretical presentation by the curatorial team will
be held on Friday morning (July 6) in the Archaeological Museum of Messenia with invited
directors and theoreticians of the video art field, including Art Historian and New Media Art
Curator Anna Hatziyiannaki, who has conducted an important and innovative curatorial work in
the areas of new media, cyber-art and bio-art in Greece, and Marina Fomenko, founder and
artistic director of “Now & After” International Video Art Festival.
All events are open and free for the public, as always.
Video Art Miden 2018 events in Kalamata are supported by the Municipality of Kalamata, FARIS
Municipal Cultural Organization, the Ephorate of Antiquities of Messenia and the Archaeological
Museum of Messenia.
Art Direction: Gioula Papadopoulou and Margarita Stavraki
Curatorial team: Gioula Papadopoulou, Margarita Stavraki, Giorgos Dimitrakopoulos, Maria
Bourika, Stavros Kapetis, Danny Kargas, Nikos Podias, Sofia Grigoriadou, Panagiotis Voulgaris
Collaborators: Vassilis Papaefstathiou/ Kalamata Filmhouse, Mena El Shazly and Mohamed Allam
(Cairo Video Festival), Marina Fomenko (Now&After), Yannis Scoulidas, Christos Tsamardas
The complete program and more info can be found on the website: www.festivalmiden.gr and at
fb: www.facebook.com/festivalmiden
Program navigation
This year’s program includes the following thematic units:
– A special tribute to Greek Video Art, with 3 screening units (Inscapes, Anatomy of silence, The
world is a theater) which highlight new morphological and conceptual trends that inspire Greek
video artists nowadays, focusing especially on the young generation.
– Three thematic units dedicated to Performative Arts, narrative video, video-performance and
videodance (Act… with or without expression, Fragments of a story, vDance). These programs
investigate the video art “loans” from the performing arts and deal with the morphological
transformations of narration, space, object and body movement in these categories of video
creation.
– Two screening programs that deal with the concept of Space, investigating boundaries between
private and public, familiar and unfamiliar, monumental and the anti-monument (In between, A
chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure).
– Three more light and colorful programs (Daydream, Freeze Frame, Scenes from an unwritten
fairytale), which create their own poetic narrations through music, animation and digital
experimentations.
– Finally, four thematic screening programs, which explore our political attitude and resistance
(Get [it] out of your system), the world of fashion and our dependence on it (Flow along surface),
the naked body as a medium of dialogue and expression (Shell) and, finally, a screening program
for a dystopian present future (The way it looks back at you).
Besides the selections by the curatorial team of Miden, the program includes 2 more curatorial
contributions from significant international festivals and a special presentation of music videos
by famous film directors, curated by Kalamata Filmhouse:
-Cairo Video Festival started in 2005, the same year as Miden. Eight editions have
taken place since, bringing artists from different countries to exhibit their video art and
experimental film works in Egypt. The festival is dedicated to the power of creative minds. The
selection hosted by Miden, curated by Mena El Shazly & Mohamed Allam, sets morphological
questions on the boundaries between different forms of visual arts and the incorporation of
elements from other arts, especially from the painting legacy, in the art of video.
– International Video Art Festival Now&After (www.now-after.org) has been carried out in
Moscow since 2011. Now&After focuses on presentation, development and promotion of both
Russian and international video art, getting together emerging and established artists from around
the world to present their works to general audience. Now&After was held in major museums and
art spaces in Moscow, such as the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Schusev State Museum of
Architecture, CCI Fabrika and many others. Founding director and curator of Now&After is Marina
Fomenko, who is visiting Miden this year and participates in the open lecture. She presents a
selection of videos which deal with phantoms of power that haunt us even when we try to ignore
them, investigating the ways that forms of power are recorded in collective memory.
-Kalamata Filmhouse (a long-standing partner of Video Art Miden in Kalamata) presents a
selection of music video-clips, directed by renown film directors in an attempt to connect the
musical message to the moving image.
_______________
Video Art Miden
Video Art Miden is an independent organization for the exploration and promotion of video art.
Founded by an independent group of Greek artists in 2005, it has been one of the earliest
specialized video-art festivals in Greece and builded an international festival identity, presenting
an annual video art festival for a decade. Since 2015, Miden continues its work changing its form
to a more flexible and broadened event programming, setting as basic aims to stimulate the
creation of original video art, to help spread it and develop relevant research.
Through collaborations and exchanges with major international festivals and organizations, it has
been recognized as one of the most successful and interesting video art platforms internationally
and as an important cultural exchange point for Greek and international video art. It also provides
an alternative meeting point for emerging and established artists and a communication hub
between artists, organizations, festivals and art spaces around the world.
Miden screening programs have traveled in many cities of Greece and all over the world, and they
are hosted by significant festivals, museums and institutions globally.
(*Miden means “zero” in Greek)